NASA’s pioneering Dawn spacecraft — which orbited the two largest objects in the asteroid belt — has run out of fuel, ending a historic 11-year mission that unravelled many mysteries of our solar system, the US space agency said.
The USD 467 million Dawn mission, launched in 2007 to study the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, missed scheduled communications sessions with NASA’s Deep Space Network on October 31 and November 1, NASA said in a statement.
After the flight team eliminated other possible causes for the missed communications, mission managers concluded that the spacecraft finally ran out of hydrazine.